by Maggie Wadey
Embracing me as we said goodbye, Annie O’Brien had asked, ‘Why did your mother never look anyone up when she came back? Sure there’d have been many at that time glad to see her. Mick Flynn – he had a fancy to your mother. He married in ’47 and, though he’s long passed away, there’s an eighteen-year-old grandchild, and Mick would have been alive still in ’89. He would have been glad to see her.’ But how could she? Fifty years away. I think of myself when I first came, lost, asking questions like a stranger, looking for something. I had nothing to lose, but my mother was walking carefully, like Annie with her jug of milk, mindful not to spill her past.
Whatever else I take away from Ireland, amongst my abiding treasures is the generosity shown to me by my family’s neighbours, a stranger on their doorsteps, claiming the rambler’s rights. Not expecting to be claimed. But I was, and now I’m caught in the web of their voices, their memories, the great tree of generations through whose branches they moved with such agility, turning the leaves of life, finding on each leaf a name, a name leading to another name, back through the years until they seemed to touch hands with Adam and Eve only to trip nimbly sideways to reach back to those still living – even to those yet unborn. Now my name’s there, too, with Agnes Kavanagh’s and those of her great-grandchildren, Tom and Erin Foley. Names on the leaves of life.
At the airport the security guard on the gate indicates I should halt the car. Smiling pleasantly, he leans down to the open window.
‘Collecting, is it?’ he asks.
‘No,’ I say. ‘Leaving.’
How nice if my book ended here, but it doesn’t. The past has one more thing to tell. As Ireland falls away behind me, my story narrows down again to two women, in a scene which could be said to have determined my entire adult life. My own little bit of untold history. Small, personal, secret.
Consilience
‘I will not let thee go, except thou bless me.’
– Jacob to the Angel, Genesis 32.26
When I came home from Dublin in 1962 I was twelve weeks pregnant. On the way back across the Irish Sea I was sick as a dog. In London I went about acquiring an abortion. Fast. At that time, abortion was illegal and expensive. Through a friend who was a nurse, I was put in touch with a Polish doctor who, for the fee of £100, was prepared to do the operation. I gave neither the safety nor the morality of my decision much thought: actually, to call it a ‘decision’ feels inaccurate. Whereas getting pregnant had seemed to me an impossibility, the getting of an abortion was necessitated by its possibility. In a sense, I had no choice (by which I certainly don’t mean to exonerate myself of responsibility). I was about to take up my place at university and neither motherhood nor marriage played any part in my plans. The doctor, an attractive, world-weary man wearing several gold rings, was sufficiently morally – or maliciously? – engaged to tell me the foetus was a healthy male child. The last abandoned child of this story. I still catch myself occasionally looking at a man in his late ‘forties, a handsome man whose hairline is maybe already beginning to recede, and thinking, That could be my son.
Whatever else it may be, abortion is always an act of violence and usually, even now, of secrecy. Of course it is. And that’s a matter of more than hypocrisy or ‘delicacy’. In my own little drama of life and death I chose, after all, to destroy an entire and unique script, perhaps denying – for example – a new life to my uncle Tom’s blue eyes, or his way with girls and horses. After the operation, I got up and walked out of the surgery. I spent one night with my boyfriend in a friend’s flat where I remember hearing a record of the Everly Brothers singing ‘God Only Knows’.
Early the following morning in New Malden the telephone went and my mother answered. A man’s voice: ‘Mrs Wadey? There’s something I thought you should know. Your daughter’s just had an abortion.’ We never knew who made that call. The doctor – perhaps conscience-stricken, or merely anxious? A malicious ex-boyfriend? My mother sat waiting for me to get home.
I closed the front door behind me. My mother turned from the window where she’d been waiting. Her face was white, twisted with pain, and there followed the most bitter scene that ever took place between us. My mother returned to the blistering form I remembered from my childhood when, at the flick of a switch, she could summon a hurricane that threatened to annihilate anything that got caught up in her whirling skirts. My argument that it had happened, it was over, that although I was too young to have a baby my boyfriend and I loved one another and wanted to live together, every link in this argument provoked a volcanic reaction of anger and distress: ‘Go then! Go and live together in some filthy hole and see how happy you are! You’re intelligent, you’ve had an education, and you’ve thrown yourself away on a young man who’ll stick at nothing. You’ll never keep him! He’s too charming for his own good. You’ve made yourself cheap as dirt, like any common stupid girl with no upbringing and no sense. So STUPID.’
How would it have been if my mother had then broken down and told me the story of Nancy and her baby? If she’d broken her silence and confided frankly in me, woman to woman, that her own most beloved sister had been equally cheap, dirty, and ‘STUPID’? How would I have taken it? Would I have been consoled by a sense of continuity, of a shared female fate – or would I have felt labelled, trapped? Surely, surely my mother and I could have spoken heart to heart and been comforted? Did she perhaps feel, even now – thirty years later, but Nancy was still alive at this time – that Nancy’s secret was not hers to tell?
The fact is, even under these extreme circumstances I wasn’t told, and that day’s terrible outburst – and its consequences – remained part of our relationship over the coming years. But none of it was referred to ever again and my father never knew. ‘If my father and my brothers knew they’d kill us!’ Shame. Sexual shame, a constant it seems in all societies and almost always blamed on women. And how especially true that was in the Ireland my mother had grown up in: sexual ignorance and shame, hand in hand. Now her daughter, who’d been brought up under the imperative to be perfect, her daughter had got herself into the same dirty stupid mess as her sister. But if it was impossible for my mother to speak, it would have been just as impossible for me to hear.
This taboo on openness between mothers and daughters, the secrecy which saps female self-worth, may seem to have been broken. The boundaries between what can and can’t be said have certainly shifted. But girls quickly work out where the silences still fall and their mothers, poor dears, are not only women but old women. Sexism and ageism, that toxic combination, still alive and well.
At that time, I was myself a young woman fast-forwarding away from the past, away from my mother, just as she had done from hers. My mother was the only one of the Kavanaghs who left Ireland without her rosary or her prayer book. Part of her care of me had been to open her hand and let me swim free, unburdened. A priceless gift.
But of course the past was still powerfully at work in her, and it was this that had now reached out and grabbed me by the scruff of the neck. The past, the dead – as I understand now – never quite lose their power, neither in nations nor in individuals, never mind all the willed forgetting.
With time self-creation becomes – perhaps surprisingly – not second nature but an increasingly demanding and exhausting project. The forward-pointing arrow of time slows, and age brings an inclination to sink back into the earth, into one’s roots. My mother’s roots were in Catholic Ireland. As she occasionally said, ‘It must be a wonderful thing to believe.’ But the consolations of Catholicism were lost to her the moment she opened that letter from the Cúnamh Rescue Society in Dublin informing her that her sister Nancy’s soul, and that of her newborn baby, were at risk of damnation. Agnes was the only one of the Kavanaghs who left Ireland without her rosary or her prayer book and although a sense of the sacred never left her, my mother’s new life was lived out in what Seamus Heaney has called ‘the weightless, profane spaces of the secular world’. And for the greater part she was content
in that space which, as a young woman, she’d actively sought out. But in old age she might have been happier had she been able to reconcile her two selves: her rooted Irish self, and the assimilated immigrant self who came into her glory in her middle years. Once Nancy died, however, the last meaningful link to her youth was gone. Often in this story I’ve remarked, ‘she never said,’ ‘my mother never mentioned it,’ or ‘this was something my mother never spoke about,’ a refrain which doesn’t so much offer some kind of criticism as underline her loneliness, her never-to-be-lost status as an emigrant, which may have contributed to an inherited vulnerability to depression.
On what was to be our last Monday evening together my mother was tired. We were talking in a desultory way about her brothers and sisters when she remarked, ‘Mother never used our names except to tick us off.’
‘You don’t use mine much.’
‘Well there’s only one of you, isn’t there?’ Then, ‘I christened you Margaret. It was you who named yourself Maggie.’
Ah, yes. Existentialism! Self-invention. Child pitted against parent: ‘I won’t be what you made me. I’ll be my own person.’ Uncharacteristically, I pushed her a little.
‘Don’t you like it?’ I asked.
She looked at me with surprisingly bright eyes.
‘Oh I like it well enough,’ she said.
So you see, those Monday evenings were important to us both. Although this was the period when I gave my mother many of the books she read with such quiet, reflective attention, and although we had a long-standing and easy modus vivendi – not least because of our love for my daughter – my mother and I still, in effect, stood either side of that black Dublin canal, in silence, unable to recognise one another. Now we were perhaps poised to speak, to see, to listen? Or maybe not. My mother, as I have since discovered, had her own reasons for silence, which neither I nor my father knew anything of. Another reason was that we’d never entirely recovered from that explosive scene which had taken place between us nearly forty years earlier.
The only thing that would assuage my mother’s pain was marriage – this in spite of the fact that she believed the marriage to be entirely unsuitable. Two months later, my father flew home from Belize (he was there on a short assignment which had, of necessity, been solo), I hired a fur cape from the Ladies’ Department of Moss Bros. and, shaking in my winkle-picker shoes, John and I married at Kingston Register Office one snowy day in January 1963. Ironic, really. A shotgun wedding after the event. There was, after all, no baby, John by that time had rather gone off the idea of marriage, and I’d never been on it, seeing myself as a lover rather than a wife. My beautiful volatile young man’s life had only just begun: he had left Trinity, Dublin, to become a student on a scholarship at RADA, and the world – some of it in the shape of very pretty young women – really was at his feet. I persuaded myself that marriage was a mere formality. Instead of church bells, we married with the dire predictions of family and friends ringing in our ears.
We were in love, but we were also young. Very young. I was twenty (just three months younger than my father when he married), and John reached twenty-three only five days before our wedding. In September that year I took up my hard-won place in the philosophy department at University College London, a married woman with no time for extracurricular life. Five years later I had my MPhil, John had begun a successful career as an actor, and we had our baby daughter. Still, there’d been grounds enough for the skeptics’ fears.
John’s godmother, Biddy, a worldly and sophisticated woman, had seen traits in me that would prove especially trying to her adored godson: I was ‘too cold, too clever, too independent’. And, as my mother had seen, my husband possessed just those characteristics that would prove in due course especially tormenting to me. But then, in love, isn’t torment what we look for as much as pleasure, instinctively seeking out the education of both our souls and our senses in the deep, secret battles and consiliences of marriage? My husband had reserves of loyalty and generosity my mother came greatly to love and appreciate and the fact is, nearly fifty years later, John and I are still together.
When I feel her, I feel her in my blood, in the set of my shoulders, in my DNA, in the dark. When I see her, I see her in the middle distance, walking away from me down an alleyway in Venice, picking an apple in a garden in France, always somewhat adream, and if our eyes meet, hers are a touch unfocused. When she looks at me I can’t tell what she sees.
When I was thirty-two I had published a novel. A few nice reviews, pathetic sales. At the time I managed not to think about the issues in the book that my mother would have difficulty with, including the central character’s abortion. It must have made painful reading, and though I honestly don’t recall how much thought I’d given to her reaction, no doubt it wasn’t enough; my book and my mother existed in different rooms in my mind. Now I acknowledge that I caused her real pain, bringing mess and stink like the foxes to her own front doorstep.
But she had loved the foxes, too.
At the time, mixed pride and embarrassment, a hint of distress, were the only reactions to my novel that she shared with me. Until, that is, many years later on one of our Monday evenings together, when she told me she’d just reread my book and that she’d ‘really enjoyed it’, even that she ‘admired’ it. I was surprised and moved. There was a pause. We looked at one another and vast questions began to balloon on the air between us, but we let the moment pass. We didn’t ask. Didn’t speak. I didn’t speak. It’s only now I see it was my place to have done so, then, that evening.
I am left talking to myself.
So do I only have the courage to speak out now she’s dead? Well of course the answer has to be ‘yes’, though perhaps ‘courage’ – with its suggestion of cowardice in not writing about her whilst she was alive – isn’t the right word. ‘Don’t you answer back!’ my mother used to say to me through gritted teeth when I was a lippy child.
The last time I saw my her well and at home was on the occasion of my husband’s and my thirty-sixth wedding anniversary when my mother took us all, including our daughter, out to dinner. When I say she took us out, I mean she paid for it. My father was always good at recognizing and valuing the work my mother did in the house. He paid money directly into her bank account which it was her responsibility to manage, and she managed it very well. That money was hers, and they both saw it that way. So it was sometimes she who took us out, and doing so gave her huge pleasure, especially that night. Somehow we were all on especially good form and Shelley, who was thirty-two on that day, was spirited and beautiful. As we chose and shared dishes my mother’s refrain was, ‘Have plenty, have plenty!’
We were all very relaxed and my mother allowed her feelings to show. Shiny-eyed, she kept looking from face to face and then around the pretty Italian restaurant with its elaborate sweets trolley and candlelit tables as if she’d found herself in fairyland. She was happy. She noticed things were good between my husband and me again and, with a raffish look in her eye, she raised her glass and said, ‘Well, I don’t know what it is he’s doing, but it’s obviously good for you!’
My mother wasn’t much of a drinker and that evening she ended up tiddly. She was light-hearted and charmingly, a little awkwardly affectionate, holding on to her granddaughter’s hand, linking her arm through both of ours and kicking up her heels as we walked back to the car. When we got home, she went upstairs, and after a few minutes I followed, to check that she was okay. I found her in their bedroom doorway, standing on one leg and helpless with laughter. The zip on her dress had caught on her petticoat and she’d got into an impossible tangle. I helped her out of her dilemma and then, leaning against the bannister, I laughed with her. The next time I saw her was in the hospital bed the day before she died.
Agnes outlived her own mother by twenty years. I go upstairs to the bedroom where my father has still left many of her things just as she used them: her talcum powder by the bed, her slippers, her silver-backed hairbrush
on the dressing table. That photograph of her on the arm of a young man in the uniform of a British soldier. There’s not just silence here but peace. Stillness. My mother’s public persona – her manner, her voice, her touch – was notably gentle and sensitive. Yet in private, in times of intense emotion, what she revealed was a volcanic power which, as a young person, I took for her true inner nature. Knowing her more intimately, though at a distance, I see that gentleness and sensitivity were very much there at her core, too – as a girl, as my father’s shy lover, as a young mother.
I go to stand at the window looking out. In the last years of her life, my mother slept badly. Sometimes, when she felt like the only human being awake on the entire planet, she used to get out of bed to make tea and from the darkened window she might see the fox – one of ‘her’ foxes fleeting away down the road. At the corner he’d look back over one shoulder, holding his brush horizontal, stiff as a shop bouquet in the hand of an iffy suitor. Then swiftly he was gone from sight, like a puff of smoke from a silent shot.
In later life, my parents seemed to be pulling in opposite directions. My father would very much like to have played bridge more often. Many of his activities took him away from the house, leaving my mother on her own. Recently, he said of himself, ‘No one could live with me now.’ Adding, ‘I don’t expect they ever could.’ My mother, meanwhile, still had dreams of elsewhere. Her favourite dream was a cottage in Shere, the village not far from London where she’d enjoyed paddling with her granddaughter. Along the path that leads back to the village is a flint wall enclosing a vegetable garden where dahlias grow in amongst the runner beans. A line of cottages overlooks the garden, within sound of the river. This last dream of my mother’s – not really within their grasp financially – was a modest version of the dreams my father had responded to when they were young, dreams which had propelled them up, up and away. But in later life, in this matter at least, my father’s law prevailed and, having moved to their home in New Malden, that’s where they stayed. Besides, my mother was tired. Only her ashes made it to the shallow river at Shere.